Cleaning Bus Bars and Nuts

If they go in the rock tumbler that you get in the toy department you'll want to get some media mild abrasive. Generally I've tumbled dry personally If you have access you can also use a sandblaster with fine sand or a glass bead cabinet All of that methodology will clean the bus bars and or nuts quite well then if you done the blasting or the tumbling you need to rinse the nuts and the bus bars really well to make sure all the abrasive is out like with varsol or something and then that's it you're good to go there's no polishing needed You may want to use some kind of a spray as you reassemble that will help inhibit corrosion and the frosted nuts in the dark bus bars moving forward I do believe it can be done I'm trying to do it with the CRC red battery spray for connections so far it seems to be working so I leave it alone. It may be cheaper just to buy new bus bars and nuts they come in sets now I think and are fairly reasonable Heck even the Toyota bus bars in the bag with the orange holder and all that is I want to say 50 bucks I just bought one from a guy brand new for like $40 I can't post the pictures here but it's in a Toyota bag I have the part number

 

As chemists say on the Internet, the higher the acid concentration, the worse it is for copper. The least harm to copper is from the acid of 5% vinegar.

Now I use the tinning method. I used to heat the solder with a gas burner and now switched to a solder pot.
I installed a weak battery in the Prius I've been driving for 8 months now. I have already changed 5 or 6 modules on this battery and there were 2 obviously bad ones when I installed it. I'm surprised this battery still works. When I remove it, we'll see the condition of the tinned bus bars.

 

So you're going to tin all the copper bus bars . Sounds good You've got the timing all You can also buy bus bars that are made out of different materials hardened etc and just look on eBay and whatnot there's a few flavors so far my copper's done well with just the light spraying of the CRC battery red stuff protector whatever it is I spray it on the back before I offer the bus bars up to the studs put the nuts on torque all that down put a spray of the red stuff across that before I close the black covers and then look in on that maybe once a year just to look so far in the two batteries I've done this to things are looking really well compared to what I took out and what I see almost daily or a couple of times a week when I'm at tow lots and that junkyards this is one of the first things I look at on these batteries sometimes I look at 20 of them a week than they are pretty ugly looking inside working or not doesn't really matter.

 

I still use muriatic acid to quickly clean bus bars. Then I use #0000 steel wool from walmart paint department and then apply water based solder wax from home depot and tin them.
I've tried a few terminal protectors but they didn't work under such conditions.
I've tried cutting out new bus bars but they quickly oxidized. The factory uses some kind of special coating for their copper bus bars, but I couldn’t find it what they use. Brand new contacts from the factory last ~5 years. They may turn black, but on the module side at the point of contact they are still shiny.
I tighten the nuts with a regular 1/4 ratchet.
I bought solder pot from aliexpress for ~$20. It works. I've used it once so far.
I’ve used it once so far and it seems to work well, but you need to do it outside, and it was cold outside and even a gas burner couldn’t heat up the solder well.

 

I guess you're taking about this stuff

Google says CRC Battery Terminal Protect 7.5 oz (Part No. 05046) does not conduct electricity.

The main goal is to keep contact areas clean.

 

I usually use new wire harnesses for my batteries, but when doing inexpensive rebuilds, I always use muriatic acid. Muriatic acid does not dissolve copper, but it does a great job on anything else. It leaves the busbars with a coppery 'matte' type finish, which can be turned into a shiny copper finish in 2 seconds by merely using a wire wheel (i use one in a drill press).

The oem nuts are just M5x0.8 flange nuts with a slightly larger flange. The ones available from places like MSC or McMaster-Car are plenty good enough and available in stainless steel and are very affordable (like $10-15).

You can also bypass the busbar and wire tab drama by spending $60 to buy a new wire harness, which comes with all new busbars. Then all you need to clean are the busbars on the side of the battery without all the wires.

 

The bus bar kits from AcenBay are very nice and work perfect.

I have AcenBay bus bars on my lithium battery, you can also use promo code "azusa" to save some $$$

 

The can I use is red but similar wording yeah I'm glad to know it doesn't conduct electricity I guess because the two batteries that I treated and all that would this stuff to protect the bus bars and what's under the orange and black covers is working perfectly The battery stays in the green almost all the time seemingly it's ridiculous actually and everything is a okay I haven't seen the magenta since these two batteries have been assembled but I'm also not one that runs a delivery service that spends all day in parking lots sitting around talking on the phone with the air conditioning on running my battery down I know a lot of guys and people who do this I'm not one I get out of the car and go into the air conditioning or whatever usually park in the shade because there's plenty of it where we go and do business things like that so I don't try to load my battery up just because I have one and it's a thing it's not a thing to me I'm not interested in running my battery all the way down into the red and all this sort of thing just because I can but I guess some people just do whatever they want I guess I don't know But so far everything's conducting electricity very well matter of fact I haven't even heard my battery fan come on in a while but I can command it on with tech and it works and it's all clean so it'll come home when necessary It's also not summer time yet I also don't run a lot of heat in the car even in the winter I like it to get about 68 in the car somewhere in that range because I have my outdoor clothes on so I don't want to be burning up. Then that 100° heat you're generating in the cabin from your body the heat of the passengers and all that That's going to cool your battery not so much.

 

If you're breaking the module studs, it's going way beyond 48 inch pounds. My testing showed they snap around 110 (iirc, it's been a couple years).
Also, the HF inch pound wrench doesn't really do a true click, more of a "break loose" on an adjustable resistance pivot. Sometimes it takes a bit of use to get adjusted to how it feels. When I purchased mine, I was pretty skeptical of HF and opened a dozen or so of them and picked the two that felt like they had the smoothest ratchet function. There's definitely a difference!! I had one 'calibrated' for 48 and one for 60. Both are still going strong.

 

You want to be talking and retoring the nuts on the battery studs You do not just want to do this by feel even though I can I don't. This can be mission critical these studs are known to pull out of the plastic and all kinds of nonsense so if you're up for that and it doesn't matter then carry on I use an electric screwdriver literally the kind you twist and it starts to turn gyroscopically yeah to run the nuts up to touch and then I go back across and torque them down with a torque wrench and that's just what you probably should be doing so that you don't have to disassemble the mess again to undo a fubar.

 

First realize 48 in/lb is only 4 ft/lbs. Very little torque. Second the HF reviews have several indicating buyers broke bolts using this wrench. Others state they never get a click when set under 50 in/lbs.

Some HF tools are pure junk. I once bought an air compressor that could not build up enough pressure to inflate a tire. Back it went. I like their $3 multitool screwdriver but that is about it for cheap HF tools.

Either spend some money on a quality in lb torque wrench or just snug them up decently.

 

Yes, the order looks right. I use the same #0000 steel wool to clean everything else on hybrid battery.
Just a little bit of paste is needed to make them moist or all the excess will burn in the solder, clogging it. It is better to do this outside or with a fan so that the smoke of the burning paste go outside. Right after dipping a bus bar in solder, I hit the pliers with which I hold the bus bar against a big hammer so that the excess solder comes off.
After cleaning them with acid and steel wool, you should immediately tin them and not leave them till next day, otherwise they will darken and then it will be difficult to clean them so that they are suitable for tinning. I use lead free solder. I bought 1lb of lead free solder and I think it will be enough for at least 20 batteries.
Lead Free Bar Solder for sale | eBay
For me this is the most obtainable and working method. You can even plate them with silver or gold, but you will still have to clean them every few years.
Yes, i just tighten them based on the 'feeling'.